Notes and Editorial Reviews

When I reviewed in these pages the previous Mozart recordings by these forces, I noted that the performances, wonderful in themselves, didn’t quite have the force or tension of my touchstone recordings by Schnabel and, in the case of K 271, Gieseking. This time I find myself thoroughly convinced by Cooper’s unaffected playing, which isRead more sensitive and probing and patrician, and by the conducting of Creswick and the sound of the Northern Sinfonia. She is all of those things in the delightful Larghetto from No. 24, which she offers tenderly, but without exaggerating the innocence of the theme with excessively delicate gestures. The theatricality of the Allegro maestoso, its grandeur, is captured in a performance slower than some, yet still lively enough to reinforce Tovey’s point that Mozart’s essence was operatic. Cooper and Creswick are not as intense as Uchida and Jeffrey Tate in the Philips recording of the same works, and of course there are, as well, admirable recordings by Ashkenazy and the gentler Perahia, to name some of the more obvious alternatives. Cooper certainly belongs among that exalted company as a Mozartean.

Customer Reviews

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